


We Could've Been

by Westgate (Harkpad)



Series: Where Is He? [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Barney Barton - Freeform, Clint Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 02:49:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10067132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harkpad/pseuds/Westgate
Summary: Starting from the prompt "Where is he?" .... Phil finds Clint in a bar, people watching and drinking a Coke. He's watching the men in the bar, men he and Barney could have become.





	

“Where is he?” Phil asks quietly.

Natasha takes a drink of her tea and continues looking through the latest National Geographic she’d brought to the cafeteria with her. “Dylan’s” is all she says, but it’s enough to make Phil sigh.

“Are you home later?” Phil asks, and she nods without looking at him.

He leaves her alone, and heads up to his office with a sinking feeling churning in his gut. He changes into jeans and a navy t-shirt and pulls on his blue canvas tennis shoes. They’re not purple Chuck Taylors like Clint tried to get him to buy (“matching is cool,” he’d argued), but they’re comfortable, and Phil won’t mind if they get beer spilled on them.

Dylan’s is a bar about fifteen minutes from headquarters, just on the edge of a seedy neighborhood. They never go there together, but Phil knows that Clint goes on his own sometimes.

Phil pushes through the rusty red door and the smell of stale beer and peanut shells assaults him as he steps inside. His eyes take a second to adjust to the dim, blue lights of the small bar, and he spots Clint at the far end of the room – the seat with a view of the whole place. He’s hunched over a glass, but he straightens a little when he sees Phil.

Phil slides onto the cracked leather barstool and flags down the bartender. He doesn’t say anything until the bartender slides up with a crooked grin. He’s a cute twenty-something with dark hair and green eyes and a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple times. His voice is rough when he asks Phil what he wants.

“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” Phil says, gesturing at Clint, who suddenly grins into his glass.

The bartender raises an eyebrow and shrugs before pulling out a glass and filling it. Phil thanked him and took a drink, unsurprised to find that it was just a plain Coke.

“How long have you been here?” he asks, turning to look at Clint.

“About an hour.”

Clint is wearing his favorite purple Chucks, and tight, faded blue jeans with a red t-shirt tucked under a black belt. He’s got a dark blue jeans jacket slung over the back of the chair. It’s his eyes that always get to Phil at times like this, though. They’re tired, downcast, and they always lose the glint that Clint in a good mood gives them. He looks like he’s been awake for days, even though Phil knows he slept a good eight hours last night.

They sit quietly, sipping their Cokes, and Clint looks around the room. Phil watches him watch the men drinking after a long day’s work. They’re rugged men, most wearing flannel shirts and jeans tucked into work boots. There’s a construction company based close by, and the men have dirt of their faces and under their fingernails, and they’re drinking Miller Light and shelling peanuts as they laugh at a story someone is telling from work that day. Phil hears one guy cussing about his boss and another talking about a stray dog that wandered onto the job site.

Phil watches Clint out of the corner of his eye as he looks around the room, listens as best he can, but mostly just stares at the men as if he’s waiting for them to do something.

Phil’s known Clint a long time. They have been lovers for years, and Phil still knows there are moments where Clint goes somewhere Phil can’t follow. Phil has watched Clint sit huddled in the corner of their couch staring at the ceiling for hours, has watched him wander the streets alone at night when he can’t sleep, has watched him sit in the SHIELD hangar rafters, leaning his head against the metal rails and watching the mechanics work on the planes through their whole shift. Phil watches the thousand yard stare move into his eyes, stay for a long while, and then leave without a word, and he knows that if he waits, Clint will come back to him.

 Sometimes they talk about it, but just as often they don’t.

“Today is Barney’s birthday,” Clint says suddenly. He says it quickly, as if he needs to spit the words out before they get stuck.

Phil sits a little closer. “Really?” He must have known that at some point, when he was working on Clint’s file before he was recruited, but Clint never talks about Barney, and Phil’s forgotten that detail. Not that this detail explains why Clint is sitting in a grungy bar by himself, drinking soda.

Clint stares at his Coke. “Yeah. He liked carrot cake, which I thought was weird, and the couple birthdays I remember with our parents I bitched about it endlessly to my mom. She let me help make the cake, but I wouldn’t eat it.”

The noise in the bar disappeared from Phil’s ears. The lights and smells of the bar vanished, and the world was narrowed to Clint telling Phil about his family in a way he never has before. “Did you get him a present?” Phil asks.

Clint laughs, a bitter sound, and looks up at Phil with a mirthless grin. “No one got presents, just the cake. It was fine – we wished, but we knew they couldn’t afford presents – but once I decided he should have a present somehow. I was,” he pauses and squints up at the ceiling like he’s trying to remember, “I think I was six. I borrowed some paper and colored pencils from school and spent an afternoon drawing his favorite comic book characters. I think I made about eight of them, including Cap’s shield, and gave them to him that night.”

Phil smiles at the thought of a tiny towheaded Clint drawing all afternoon just to please his brother. “Did he like them?”

Clint doesn’t answer, and Phil’s heart breaks a little. They sit quietly again.

He sees Clint watch a young man about his height and just a few years older get up from a table and come to the bar near them to order a drink. His reddish hair is cut short and his eyes are full of laughter as he jokes with the bartender.

Phil worries that Clint is going to bore a hole in the poor guy’s head with the heavy stare he’s levelling and feels a flutter of nerves in his belly at the obviousness of Clint’s attention. The guy gets his drink and heads back to his table without a look in their direction.

“I come here every once in a while,” Clint reveals.

“Yeah,” Phil answers. “I know, and it’s usually when you’re kind of down.”

Clint blinks at him in surprise, like he didn’t know Phil noticed that sort of thing. He sets his hand down next to Phil’s so that they’re touching, and Phil wonders if he should steer them home, into a safer space to be close. But Clint gestures around the room in a sweeping motion and looks Phil in the eyes.

“These men,” he starts, but he stops and has to swallow. He looks around the room again, so Phil follows his gaze, taking in the crowd of rough, tired-looking guys.

“These men,” Clint tries again. “They could be Trickshot, Duquesne, Barney, my father – any one of ‘em. Rough people with nothing much to look forward to.” He stops and Phil desperately wants to pull him into a hug.

Clint continues, “Hell, they could be me if I’d stayed with Carson’s too much longer. That guy who just got a beer? He could be Barney’s stunt double or something.” He pauses and adds, “His name’s Luke and he has a son he’s paying child support for.”

Phil tries to keep the surprise off of his face, but he doesn’t think it works. “You know – “ he begins, but he’s not sure how to finish.

“I miss Barney,” Clint says in a whisper, and he stares back at his Coke. “I don’t know where he is, or if he’s still alive, or if he has a wife and kids, or if he’s happy.” Now he looks back at Phil with a tired grin. “He doesn’t know that I’m happy.”

“Clint,” Phil starts, but he’s not sure what to do with all of this.

“I tried to look for him. Once I got my SHIELD clearance I tried to track him down, but his records stop when he got discharged from the ARMY. I talked to some of his unit buddies, but they didn’t have any information either. So I don’t know where he is, and sometimes, especially on his birthday, I like to come here and remind myself of the kind of men I used to know.”

Phil sits, stunned by all of this. They’ve never talked about Barney. “I thought you didn’t like to talk about him,” he says, before he can stop himself.

Clint nods. “I don’t. But his birthday came up and I realized that I wish even more that I could find him and see if he’s okay.” He pauses and looks at Phil again. .”I wish that I could buy him a beer and tell him how happy I am, too.” He leans into Phil’s shoulder. “Maybe introduce you two.”

That’s when Phil makes a decision. He stands up, throws a ten dollar bill on the bar and pulls Clint to his feet. “Can we get out of here?” he asks, and Clint looks around the room again, takes one more drink of his soda, and nods.

When they get home to their apartment, Phil pulls Clint in for a long, slow kiss. When they pull back, Clint’s eyes are shining again. Phil says, “I wanted to get you home to do that, and I want to cook for you and maybe we can celebrate Barney’s birthday by watching an old movie you guys liked when you were kids?”

Clint presses his forehead to Phil’s shoulder and sighs heavily. “Okay. Okay, that sounds awesome.”

When they settle themselves on the couch later, with “Alien” beginning on the screen in front of them, Phil pulls his work laptop out of his bag and opens it up. He goes to the program that lets him do a missing person’s search.

“What are you doing?” Clint asks, staring at the computer.

“Well,” Phil says gently. “My clearance is different than yours. I’ll bet I can get farther than an ARMY discharge.”

 

 

   

**Author's Note:**

> It occurred to me that this series might seem like a Barney-story. As much as I adore Barney stories, this is not that. It's a series of one-shots all based on the "Where is he?" prompt. I have a Barney story in a WIP folder that I should drag out because Barney is amazing, but that is for another time.


End file.
